1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to speech processing and more specifically to speech recognition.
2. Introduction
Telephone based customer service is a tremendous expense for businesses. Many recent advances have facilitated automation of numerous aspects of customer service in this sector, saving millions of dollars. Early attempts at automation involved speech synthesis by a computing device and user input in the form of button presses. More modern telephone system automation uses speech recognition to allow callers to interact more naturally. However, accurate and dependable speech recognition relies on a transcription lexicon capable of converting between words and phonemes. Lexicon accuracy is one factor influencing recognition accuracy. A lexicon can be deficient if it fails to contain words to be recognized, or so called Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) words. The lexicon can also be deficient if it contains inaccurate transcriptions, or only has a single transcription for a word when the word is pronounceable in more than one way, as is the case with many proper names. In an automated speech recognition system or an interactive voice response system, inaccurate speech recognition is extremely detrimental. Although such systems can save significant amounts of money when compared to hiring people to answer phones, if callers are frustrated by poor speech recognition, the cost savings can be outweighed by loss of goodwill.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way to generate lexica which allow for more accurate speech recognition.